“The other very first question I ask you is, have you asked the Ukrainians to test this yet? If the answer is no, I’ll say, why? Because that’s where you get into an environment where we actually know does it work or does it not,” Gen. Christopher Donahue, commander of U.S. Army Europe and Africa, said Wednesday at an AUSA event. “It has to be able to adapt and integrate. It has to be cheap. The scale and the scope of this stuff, it has to be cheaper … In combat, as you all know, it changes every 60 or 90 days. Air, ground, water — we don’t care. It’s going to change the whole time. So how can you modify your platforms?”

The full-scale Ukraine-Russia war, which kicked off in 2022, has proved to be a global lesson for how future wars could be fought, with the U.S. and other nations — to include China, which reportedly hacked into Russian systems to gain insights — taking valuable observations. 

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll has called Ukraine the Silicon Valley of warfare. 

The Army, maybe more so than any other service, has sought to transform based on observations in Ukraine to include large investments in commercial systems such as drones and counter-drone technology. The organization is trying to go commercial as much as possible, based largely on insights from the battlefield where technology and countermeasures change almost daily. 

The antiquated acquisition system of the past, geared more toward large platforms that take years to develop and field, is now considered by leadership as unsuitable. 

“We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said earlier this month.

As such, Donahue said the Army also needs to change its contracting approach. 

“On our side, we have to be able to write contracts differently. This is one of Gen. George and Secretary Driscoll’s big efforts — is not only all the obvious stuff that I’m talking about, it’s also contracting. How do you … do all that?” he said. “You have to be able to change your contracts, turn on, turn them off, go to a different vendor, based off of which what you have to hang off the whatever the robot is, air, ground or sea.”

Donahue has extensive experience aiding Ukraine. Prior to his current role, he was the commander of XVIII Airborne Corps and was instrumental in the early days of the conflict helping Kyiv’s military with tactics and strategy.

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For starters, leaders believe it is a validation of some of the radical change the service is seeking in how to procure and manage capabilities differently in the future.

“Yesterday was a really good example of just how quickly technology is changing the battlefield. We’ve seen this over the last couple of years that everybody talks about [Program Objective Memorandum] cycles and everybody talks about program of record. I think that’s just old thinking,” Gen. Randy George, chief of staff of the Army, said Monday during the Exchange, an AI conference hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project.

POM cycles refer to the five-year planning process for programs and capabilities in the Pentagon.

George noted that technology is changing too rapidly on the modern battlefield to be wedded to these large procurement programs that historically have taken years to develop and once fielded, can be largely obsolete.

He wants to shrink the timeline it takes to develop systems and get them in the hands of soldiers, especially given much of these capabilities, such as drones, communications gear and electronic warfare tools, are increasingly available on the commercial market.

“What we got to do is make sure that we’re aligned and that’s what we’re trying to do, changing the processes up here to make sure that we’re getting them the equipment, the war-winning capabilities that they know they need,” he said. “We’re going to have to be more agile. Drones are going to constantly change. We’re going to be trying to play the cat-and-mouse game with counter-UAS, so we’re going to have to work through that to make sure that we’re buying systems. We’re going to need a lot more agility in how we buy things.”

The Army has been experimenting with this approach through what it calls transforming-in-contact, which aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

George said one of the Army’s units that just went to the Joint Readiness Training Center at Fort Johnson, Louisiana — which provides the most realistic combat scenarios the Army can create for units to train where forces simulate a battle campaign against an active enemy — had close to 400 drones in it. That is substantially higher than the number of drones other formations have had recently, with 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division possessing over 200 during a January rotation in Europe, previously the most to date.

The Army doesn’t want to field the same systems like that for years because the technology changes so rapidly.

“We’re constantly updating those. I think that that’s how we have to be focused moving forward,” George said.

He also noted that Ukraine’s drone attack over the weekend flips the cost curve. Kyiv used relatively cheap systems to destroy millions to billions of dollars worth of Russian combat power.

“Look at how cheap those systems were compared to what they took out. We have to be thinking about that [with] everything we’re doing,” George said.

The attack, furthermore, exemplified how transparent battlefields are becoming, meaning there is nowhere to hide.

“We talk a lot about you can’t really hide anymore on the modern battlefield. You’re going to have to be dispersed, lower signature, all of those things, which we talk a lot about with our troops and with our commanders,” George said.

Moreover, the attack was videoed and viewed around the world hours later. The increasingly open-source nature of information about military activities around the world has implications for how the Army will operate in the future.

“We all knew about that within a matter of minutes. Everything was out there on open source,” George said.

The high-profile Ukrainian assault against Russian bombers came as the U.S. Army is in the midst of a major transformation effort. At the end of April, the service announced what it dubbed Army Transformation Initiative, where it seeks to shrink its headquarters elements, become leaner and change how it spends.

As part of that effort, Secretary Dan Driscoll said his service pitched itself to President Donald Trump and Pentagon leadership as the “innovation engine” for the Department of Defense by plucking the best ideas and technologies from the commercial sector and testing them out in the Army.

“We fundamentally believe the Army should be the innovation engine of the Pentagon … but we have to earn that right,” Driscoll said alongside George at Monday’s AI conference. “We basically said, hey, we will earn the right to do this by — we’ll cut ourselves. For ATI, the other thing … is it’s $3 billion dollars of cuts, and that’s a lot of money that people want to go to other programs. We’ve made the cuts, we’re recycling it to buy the things we want and need. We’re going to continue to run that engine and innovate.”

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Pevkur hosted a small group of journalists at the Embassy of Estonia in Washington while he was in town for a two-day visit with his American counterparts and lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Topics discussed included a massive ongoing military drill with participation from 16,000 Estonian and allied forces, and the latest on Russia’s hybrid warfare activities in Europe against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, among others.

“Can you say that we have prevented attacks [from Russia] in Europe? Well, I’m not going to be very specific, but I can say that, yes, the European services together have prevented different types of hybrid attacks. But unfortunately, we’re not going into more details,” Pevkur told DefenseScoop.

Estonia shares an 183-mile border — and a complex history — with Russia. Since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Baltic nation has been intentional about applying digital technology to build a transparent and efficient government.

On the heels of invading Ukraine and initiating the full-scale war in early 2022, Russia started conducting so-called “hybrid” warfare activities involving drones, cyber intrusions and other assets against Estonia and nearby NATO members.

Pevkur said that “luckily,” Estonia has not experienced “direct hybrid attacks in recent weeks or months.” However, he noted that nations also lack a clear definition for every type of assault that could constitute hybrid warfare, which introduces challenges when identifying the threats.   

“We see [hybrid attacks as] basically everything below the Article Five threshold [that would trigger a collective self-defense response from NATO]. So when we take the attack on [Leonid Volkov, a close associate of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, in Lithuania], or assassination attempts, or the attack on [Estonia’s Interior Minister, Lauri Läänemets’] car, or attacks on journalists — we put them altogether — and the main indicator is that all these attacks, whatever they are, were they orchestrated by the Russian services or not? And now the question is, can we also prove that?” Pevkur explained.

“So this is why we cannot point the finger at the moment to the attacks associated with the [sabotage of Baltic Sea submarine infrastructure]. We cannot say clearly that they are hybrid attacks,” he told DefenseScoop.

As the defense minister suggested, in recent months, a large fleet of so-called ghost or shadow vessels allegedly commanded by Russia are being deployed — often without flags — around the Baltic Sea to circumvent Western sanctions and illegally export oil, among other operations. One such tanker detained by authorities late last year was suspected of disrupting a subsea power cable that connects Finland and Estonia.

“There are close to around 500 ships in the world which we can identify as a shadow fleet crew or shadow fleet vessels,” Pevkur said. “We know all of them.”

He pointed to the Kiwala —  a vessel originally sailing under the flag of Djibouti, with a Chinese captain and on the sanctions list in multiple countries — that the Estonian navy intercepted in April. The military held it up for inspections until dozens of “deficiencies” were resolved.

“They are one-layer tankers. They pose a huge environmental risk. And the Baltic Sea and Finnish Gulf are very shallow, so when something happens, the ocean can maybe handle this somewhere in the Atlantic — but the Baltic Sea cannot. And the environmental impact will be huge,” Pevkur said.

“So this is why, yes, we are monitoring every ship, every vessel which enters into the Baltic Sea, and we check all of them. The monitoring system is in place. We share the information with our allies, and if necessary, we will act — as we did with the Kiwala,” he told DefenseScoop.

Estonia’s leadership recently pledged to invest more than 5% of the nation’s GDP for defense spending annually, and alongside America has been encouraging NATO allies to do the same.

“Over half of that money will go directly into the capabilities — so new vessels, the renovation of the old vessels, air defense systems” or other platforms, Pevkur said.

He noted that his team wanted to schedule a meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth while in Washington, but that wasn’t doable because the Pentagon chief is currently traveling with President Donald Trump in the Middle East.

“Hopefully we will meet on the third of June in Brussels” during EU Week, Pevkur said. “For me, of course, it’s important to be in contact with Pete.”

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Their meetings come after President Donald Trump temporarily froze hundreds of millions in American security assistance and ended intel exchanges with Ukraine for more than a week in early March, which caused a major disruption to Kyiv’s defensive battlefield operations. During a briefing with reporters at the German Marshall Fund think tank on Thursday, the Ukrainian delegation shed new light on the frontline impacts of that intel pause and the messages they aimed to articulate to their U.S. counterparts.

“When the weapons supplies were stopped — and the intel-sharing, which was much worse — that was a disaster. Even though it was not a complete shutdown of sharing, it was something that we felt that we couldn’t [fully] replace with anything else that the Europeans have,” said Oleksandra “Sasha” Ustinova, chair of Ukraine’s Parliamentary Special Commission on Arms Control. 

For more than a decade, U.S. spy agencies and contractors have supplied sophisticated surveillance imagery and intelligence to Ukraine that’s proven instrumental in anticipating and responding to Russian attacks.

Oleksandr Zavitnevych, chair of the Parliament’s Committee on National Security, Defense, and Intelligence, (through his interpreter) explained that the Trump-ordered intelligence halt lasted between one and two weeks. He said that combat operations continued during that time and Ukraine’s military was still able to obtain some useful information from other international partners, including the U.K. and France. 

However, Zavitnevych told reporters that his message to leaders at 11 meetings in Washington this week was clear: “Please, while we make those [negotiation] efforts and work on those issues — please don’t shut down intelligence-sharing.”

“We think that would be a disaster if that happens again,” Ustinova also said.

The current state of play with Europe marked another key item the group sought to call attention to this week, she confirmed, noting that many countries in that region continue to step up significantly to support Ukraine in the fight. 

“Everybody’s willing to pay more. The biggest fear they have right now is that the United States might shut down, basically their third-party transfer, so that they cannot buy [weapons and assets] and give it to us. We’re totally dependent on all the missiles, especially missiles for the Patriots — you’re the only ones who do that,” Ustinova said, referring to a high-tech air defense system.

At the roundtable, the officials also emphasized that since Russia’s full-scale invasion three years ago, Ukraine’s production facilities have steadily operated under continuous air strikes and wartime threats. However, the nation’s production output has grown considerably for some in-demand items over that time period.

“Speaking of the newest technologies — like the drones, which became a true weapon, like a military and delivery device. This new type of weapon essentially emerged in 2022. And last year, Ukraine produced over a million such units. [Now, we’ll procure and produce] over 3 million such drones,” Zavitnevych said.

He told DefenseScoop that when the U.S. intel and weapons hold went into effect last month, Ukraine’s government launched a country-wide campaign called “make a drone in your home.”

“In fact, many people did assemble them from some kits at home. But then an additional step was once they shipped them to some facility, then others would have to test their quality assurance. The idea of this was not so much to actually get a great output of those drones, homemade drones — but rather to get people interested and involved in defense. This was an element of national resistance,” Zavitnevych said.

When the German Marshall Fund’s head of strategic democracy initiatives Josh Rudolph likened those DIY drones to improvised Molotov cocktail weapons used in World War II, Zavitnevych said it’s “exactly the same thing.” 

Drones and other uncrewed systems have been a central weapon in the Russia-Ukraine war, with recent reports that they are now killing more people and enabling more damage than any traditional weapons on that contemporary battlefield. Currently, Ukraine’s drone arsenal includes systems that can carry payloads ranging between 1 to 100 kilograms, or more than 200 pounds of explosives, according to Zavitnevych.

“I don’t believe any country in the world has the capability to have one person in charge of such a big number of drones that would destroy a whole division. But I will tell you honestly, this is a thing of the future, which will come quite soon,” he told DefenseScoop.

Today’s battles have led him to believe that future warriors won’t necessarily have to be in elite physical condition. Instead, he said they’ll more likely be “a man or woman controlling drones and the platforms that are deployed.”

“It is the weapon of the future. It’s important to point out, it is cheap — and I mean not inexpensive, but cheap,” Zavitnevych said. 

He noted that a first–person drone priced around $600 U.S. dollars could carry two-kilogram payloads that can “easily demolish two to three floors of this building.”

“Whereas a projectile of caliber 155 will cost several thousand euros. To shoot that projectile, you need a cannon that costs tens of millions of dollars and a factory that costs $100 million that manufactures those projectiles. But with an FPV [drone], you and me can do [an operation] together in two or three days,” Zavitnevych said.

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Gen. Christopher Cavoli, who is dual-hatted as the Eucom chief and Supreme Allied Commander Europe for NATO, gave lawmakers an update on the war and the current battlefield situation Thursday during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

“The scale of this conflict is just awe-inspiring. Thousands of tanks destroyed on both sides,” Cavoli said.

At the start of the full-scale war in February 2022, Russia had about 13,000 tanks on active status and in storage, according to Cavoli.

“They’re starting to approach near the end of … the useful tanks in storage. So, depending on how much more they lose, that will really determine how quickly they can regenerate,” he told lawmakers.

“Russian ground forces in Ukraine have lost an estimated 3,000 tanks, 9,000 armored vehicles, 13,000 artillery systems, and over 400 air defense systems in the past year,” Cavoli said in a written statement to the committee.

However, Moscow is on pace to replace those losses, he added, noting that it has expanded its industrial production, opened new manufacturing facilities, and converted commercial production lines for military purposes.

“As a result, the Russian defense industrial base is expected to roll out 1,500 tanks, 3,000 armored vehicles, and 200 Iskander ballistic and cruise missiles this year. (Comparatively, the United States only produces about 135 tanks per year and no longer produces new Bradley Fighting Vehicles.) Additionally, we anticipate Russia to produce 250,000 artillery shells per month, which puts it on track to build a stockpile three times greater than the United States and Europe combined,” Cavoli wrote.

Cavoli did not provide comparative figures for Ukraine’s equipment losses and weapons production.

Moscow’s production capability for some items, such as artillery shells and cruise missiles, has expanded “tremendously,” and it’s building one-way attack drones “in prodigious numbers,” he told senators, noting that Russian ground forces are integrating reconnaissance and kamikaze drones into their offensive operations on the battlefield.

Ukraine has used a variety of weapons — including unmanned aerial systems, artillery and Javelin missiles, among others — to destroy Russian tanks and other equipment.

Cavoli noted that both sides in the conflict are also conducting long-range attacks, with the Russians deploying cruise missiles and glide bombs and the Ukrainians relying mainly on one-way attack drones.

Ukraine is also using “some indigenously produced cruise missile systems — one in particular that I’ve got in mind that we can talk about in closed session,” Cavoli told SASC members.

The U.S. has provided large quantities of UAS — including kamikaze drones such as Switchblades and the Phoenix Ghost family of systems — to Kyiv since the war began to help it counter Russia’s invasion.

However, Ukraine’s defense industry has ramped up and is producing many of its own munitions.

“I would say they’re the world leaders in one-attack drone technology,” Cavoli told lawmakers.

President Donald Trump, noting the heavy losses on both sides of the conflict, has been pressuring Ukraine to reach a peace deal with Russia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military is learning lessons from the war.

Cavoli mentioned the Army’s transforming-in-contact initiative — which is focused on modernizing the force with UAS, counter-UAS and electronic warfare — as an example of how the Defense Department is shaking things up based on what officials are seeing in Europe.

“Our use of drones has changed deeply across the joint force. Before this conflict, in the U.S. Army, for example, we had very few [UAS], but large drones associated with large units. Now we’re proliferating smaller drones to smaller units and having a larger number of drones in lower and lower hands. Fundamental change in the way where we’re doing business,” he said.

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U.S.-based drone companies AeroVironment and Dragoon, as well as U.S.-based software firms Swan and Auterion, were chosen to compete in the project called Artemis, DIU said in a news release. Notably, the two software companies are each partnering with separate unnamed Ukrainian drone manufacturers.

DIU initiated Artemis in response to a congressional mandate, which directed operational testing of low-cost loitering munitions that can fly in electromagnetic contested environments and be deployed in large numbers. The unit wants to have a successful prototype by the end of fiscal 2025.

“We are excited about the non-traditional companies who are providing low-cost, adaptable, long-range, UAS platforms with the potential to maximize operational flexibility for the Joint force,” Trent Emeneker, DIU’s Artemis program manager and contractor, said in a statement. “This was the intent of Congress’ direction to rethink how to get capabilities to the warfighter at speed and scale that can deliver much faster than traditional Programs of Record.”

After releasing a solicitation in October 2024, DIU and the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment evaluated 165 proposals from vendors, held flight demonstrations and then down-selected to four industry teams, according to DIU.

With contracts in place, “the next step is meeting an aggressive testing and integration schedule to complete prototyping and demonstrate success by the end of May 2025,” DIU stated in a release.

The solicitation called for one-way, ground-launched drones from commercial vendors with an operational range of 50 to 300 kilometers or more. DIU wants Artemis prototypes that can carry a 10-plus kilogram payload more than 50 kilometers, and are “capable of supporting high-speed, low-altitude, beyond line of sight flight operations in [disrupted, disconnected, intermittent, and low-bandwidth] environments,” according to the RFP. Ideally, the organization would like the drones to be able to carry a 25-plus kilogram payload upwards of 300 kilometers.

Officials emphasized the Artemis program is directly linked to emerging trends on modern battlefields. Throughout Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, inexpensive kamikaze drones from commercial vendors have provided warfighters on both sides with key capabilities. In the Middle East, Iranian-backed Houthis launched multiple complex attacks on U.S. Naval forces stationed in the Red Sea last year, as well.

“With Artemis, DIU and A&S are moving rapidly to provide an option for Services and Combatant Commands to choose from, delivered years in advance of current Program of Record timeframes,” DIU stated in a release.

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The top-down requirements process Ukraine’s military inherited from Moscow in the 1990s kept headquarters analysts employed but left 87 percent of needs unfulfilled. Today, warfighters get the final say in what gets built. Drones that once relied on GPS and luck now use automated navigation and targeting algorithms to overcome operator error and Russian jamming, raising success rates from 20 percent to 70 percent. The newest generation uses fiber-optic cable for communication to eliminate the threat of electronic interference.

The Pentagon’s approach to weapon development looks more like the one used by Soviet apparatchiks. Requirements officers in the Joint Staff and military services try to guess capability gaps and potential solutions years in advance. By the time these analyses emerge from the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) two years later, the threat has changed, technology has marched on, and a different solution is likely needed.

By definition, predictive planning systems such as JCIDS cannot work in a dynamic environment. They define performance metrics before testing a single prototype because they assume cutting-edge defense systems can only arise from dedicated government-led research and development. That approach is now obsolete thanks to the rapid advance and broad availability of militarily-relevant commercial technology.

Ukraine’s successes show how the U.S. Department of Defense could unlock the potential of private-sector innovation through collaborative experimentation between engineers and operators. Instead of funneling their needs through a multi-year staffing process, Ukrainian commanders talk with local drone pilots and data scientists to identify problems and reach out to government offices that can pay for solutions.

Under Kyiv’s innovation model, a new uncrewed system concept can reach the battlefield in months, drawing on commercial AI to quickly adapt flight paths or identify targets in thousands of video streams. For example, a volunteer-driven missile team eschewed extensive predictive analysis and prototyped a new cruise missile in a year and a half — an unthinkable timeline under Ukraine’s previous Soviet-model bureaucracy.

Real-time operator feedback is essential to this approach. It defines what is “good enough” and helps program managers cut through the competing equities that often prevent a system from reaching the field. In less than a year, Ukraine’s military created Delta, a situational awareness system like the elusive Joint All-Domain Command and Control concept that the Pentagon has chased for nearly a decade. Coders started Delta with a single battlefield map and added new modules when soldiers asked for them. Now the system ties together thousands of drones, cameras, satellite feeds, and Western cannon and rocket artillery systems.

Instead of waiting for a glacial interagency process to dictate universal interoperability requirements, Delta’s developers iteratively add new elements and test them in the real fight. During NATO interoperability exercises in 2023, Delta proved the value of this bottom-up approach by sharing data via Link 16 with F-16 jets and integrating with Poland’s TOPAZ artillery fire control software. Delta reflects genuine cross-domain synergy, born out of emergent needs and continuous iteration, not years of staff approvals.

Ukraine’s success is not simply a fluke born out of existential desperation; it’s the logical consequence of removing unnecessary processes and letting warfighters shape the pipeline. While we in the United States prioritize box-checking staffing for documents that meet formatting guidelines and have all the right system views and appendices, Ukraine lets demand drive immediate action. This shift from central planning to distributed innovation has not only kept Ukraine in the fight but also opened the door to realizing advanced integrations like real-time targeting.

The Pentagon should take Ukraine’s combat lessons to heart and fund the work to find solutions for today’s problems. Requirements officers should stop trying to predict the future and begin collecting and refining operational challenges to drive experimentation. And acquisition executives should give innovative program managers and their industry partners the decision space to quickly develop systems that deliver relevant capability, use existing components, and can respond to future enemy countermeasures.

The DOD has experimented with new acquisition pathways and innovation initiatives that have these attributes. But “Band-Aid” solutions that speed up paperwork or create more prototypes don’t address the core problem: a requirements system that prioritizes predictive planning over operational results.

The Pentagon should retire centralized requirements processes such as JCIDS. In their place, the U.S. military services should fund focused campaigns of experimentation that test multiple solutions against clear operational problems, enable rapid learning from failure, and scale what actually works in realistic conditions. Until the DOD abandons its Soviet-style faith in headquarters apparatchiks and embraces structured experimentation driven by warfighters, it will continue to fall behind adversaries who are willing to adapt and learn.

Bryan Clark is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, and an expert in naval operations, electronic warfare, autonomous systems, military competitions and wargaming. Previously, he served as special assistant to the chief of naval operations and director of the CNO’s Commander’s Action Group, led studies on the Navy headquarters staff, and was an enlisted and officer submariner in the Navy.

Dan Patt is a senior fellow with the Hudson Institute’s Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, where he focuses on the role of information and innovation in national security. Patt also supports strategy at national security technology company STR and supports Thomas H. Lee Partners’ automation and technology investment practice. Previously, he co-founded and was CEO of Vecna Robotics and served as deputy director for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Strategic Technology Office.

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The new Pentagon chief, who is in the middle of his first overseas trip in that capacity, laid out his vision for a “division of labor” for security on the continent during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium.

During the Biden administration, the United States provided more than $65 billion in security assistance to Ukraine, including a variety of drones, counter-drone systems and other tools, according to the Pentagon. The European Union and its member states have provided Kyiv more than $48 billion in military assistance, according to a Congressional Research Service report that was updated last month.

“Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine. Members of this contact group must meet the moment. This means donating more ammunition and equipment, leveraging comparative advantages, expanding your defense industrial base, and importantly, leveling with your citizens about the threat facing Europe,” Hegseth said, reiterating President Donald Trump’s call for other NATO members to spend at least 5 percent of their GDP on defense.

He noted that many European countries are already co-leading “capability coalitions” to assist Kyiv, with groups focusing on eight technology buckets including drones, air-and-missile defense, information technology, air force, maritime security, artillery, armor and de-mining.

“These groups are doing great work to coordinate Europe’s contributions of … assistance across eight key capability areas. These are first steps. More must still be done. We ask each of your countries to step up on fulfilling the commitments that you have made, and we challenge your countries and your citizens to double down and recommit yourselves, not only to Ukraine’s immediate security needs, but to Europe’s long-term defense and deterrence goals,” Hegseth said.

The Trump administration wants to see a quick end to the war and the preservation of Ukrainian sovereignty, but it doesn’t intend to send American troops to Ukraine as part of a peacekeeping force or security guarantor following a diplomatic settlement to the Ukraine-Russia war, he noted, adding that NATO membership for Ukraine and a return to pre-2014 borders are “unrealistic” objectives for a negotiated deal to end the conflict.

“Our transatlantic alliance has endured for decades, and we fully expect that it will be sustained for generations to come. But … it will require our European allies to step into the arena and take ownership of conventional security on the continent. The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe — full stop — but the United States will no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship … which encourages dependency, rather our relationship will prioritize empowering Europe to own responsibility for its own security,” he added.

According to Hegseth, “stark strategic realities” will compel the U.S. to focus more on other areas of the world.

“The United States faces consequential threats to our homeland. We must and we are focusing on security of our own borders. We also face a peer competitor in the communist Chinese with the capability and intent to threaten our homeland and core national interests in the Indo-Pacific. The U.S. is prioritizing deterring war with China in the Pacific, recognizing the reality of scarcity and making the resourcing tradeoffs to ensure deterrence does not fail,” he said. “As the United States prioritizes its attention to the threats, European allies must lead from the front. Together, we can establish a division of labor that maximizes our comparative advantages in Europe and Pacific, respectively.”

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The company has sought to outfit its Vehicle Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment (VAMPIRE) to small unmanned surface vessels, Jon Rambeau, who leads the Integrated Mission Systems business at L3Harris, said in an interview at the annual WEST conference in San Diego.

VAMPIRE has already been deployed to Ukraine to help counter Russian drone attacks, and officials from the vendor view it as a potentially key system in thwarting other unmanned threats, such as those from the Houthis, a group backed by Iran that has controlled portions of Yemen — including the capital — since 2014. That group has been firing missiles and drones at Navy and commercial ships in the Red Sea in response to U.S. support for Israel’s war against Hamas.

“In the Red Sea to take out these very low cost, attritable threats, this is an alternative that has an interceptor that is between $20,000 and $30,000 a shot, so just vastly more affordable. These could be set up as a picket line as a standoff to either commercial ships or military vessels,” Rambeau said.  

The Navy has expended multimillion-dollar missiles to shoot down enemy drones in the Red Sea, resulting in an expensive cost-per-kill ratio. Service officials have noted this isn’t sustainable, and they’ve called for the development of better, more cost-effective countermeasures against them, such as non-kinetic methods.

The adaptation of VAMPIRE to the maritime domain is part of L3Harris’ strategy to get systems to the battlefield faster. Rambeau noted that the expectation with the new administration is there won’t be a lot of patience for lengthy and expensive developmental efforts.

In his first message to the force, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he wants to rapidly field emerging technologies.

Utilizing systems that have been proven in one domain, such as VAMPIRE, and making slight modifications to bring them to another, is a prime example of using what’s already out there to speed delivery, Rambeau said.

“I think L3Harris has a lot of very affordable, relevant, mature capability on the shelf that’s right here now … Single-digit millions off the shelf ready to go,” Rambeau said, regarding VAMPIRE as well as other offerings the company is looking to modify. “I’ve said this very directly to a number of our stakeholders in government, there are relevant, operationally proven, mature capabilities available off the shelf today for what’s [a] rounding error on cost of a ship or a satellite or a couple of radar arrays or fill in the blank. Very, very, very affordable and can be delivered in time to be relevant in 2027. We’re anxious to provide as much of that capability as possible.”

Rambeau said they’ve written algorithms to adjust for the maritime domain for VAMPIRE already, which is the challenging aspect of it. Now, they’re waiting for range time to test it, which should take place by the end of April.  

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Sullivan shared new details about those takeaways and other defense-related discussions he’s engaging in amid the presidential transition — including the Pentagon’s fast-tracked drone-fielding initiative Replicator — with a small group of reporters at the White House on Wednesday. 

“[One] area where we’ve begun the process, where I think they need to move very rapidly, is in the integration of artificial intelligence capabilities into not just weapons systems, but everything — the back office, logistics and supply systems — all of it, basically,” he told DefenseScoop at the invite-only roundtable.

Broadly, the DIB encompasses the entities that provide the military with the material, products and services needed to deter and prevail in conflict and global competition. 

But beyond that, the Biden administration has also called on the DIB to produce those items for international partners currently engaged in warfare, including Ukraine and Israel — as well as Taiwan, for deterrence purposes. 

Sullivan noted that in his early months at the White House, his team was sharply focused on the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan and “working through kind of setting up [the administration’s] strategy with respect to a lot of other significant issues in the world.”  

“So, DIB was not at the top of the list for me, walking in the door. And it was really the lead-up to the war in Ukraine in the fall of ‘21 that I began to recognize that, in many respects, the cupboard was bare,” Sullivan said.

Around that same time, the AUKUS trilateral security alliance between Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. was announced. Sullivan subsequently started looking into the submarine industrial base’s capacity for tasks associated with the partnership’s Pillar I aims.

“People would produce charts for me — basically going back to 1990 — the workforce challenges, the supply chain challenges, the under-investment. And it became clear to me that this has been a story that I don’t think has gotten the attention it’s deserved,” Sullivan explained.

Those experiences made him fully recognize what he called “the importance of a demand signal from the top.” 

During Sullivan’s tenure, Biden’s administration published the U.S.’s first National Defense Industrial Strategy and implementation plan to guide engagement, policy development, and investment in the DIB in the near term.

“Turning the vision into execution is difficult, and it takes persistence and repeat demand signal. And even then, you’re only going to get a portion of the things you are asking for. And so one of my pieces of advice for the incoming team is, right out of the gate, take this momentum that we’ve begun to build up and really push. Don’t kind of wait a year or two years on it. Let’s push now,” Sullivan said.

DefenseScoop asked the national security advisor to expand on some of the other tips he’s leaving behind to his counterparts in the Trump administration.

“One of the things that I have asked the incoming team to do is to take a brief on the elements of the defense industrial base that I’ve taken so that in the early weeks, they’re sort of fully up to speed on exactly what we’re still facing as deficits — with respect to subs, with respect to long-range strike. Those are two areas in particular that I would be focused on and that I told the next team to take a hard look at,” Sullivan said. 

On his way out, Sullivan said he’s also encouraging the incoming team to continue to focus on accelerating AI adoption across the Pentagon and military, which was also a top priority in Trump’s first administration.

“I think DOD is working that, but we have to go a lot further, a lot faster. So that’s another area that I’ve told the upcoming team to put attention to. We’ve got this national security memorandum. It has put out a lot of tasks for the defense enterprise. Those tasks are beginning to be completed, but that work is going to have to continue in a big way under the new team,” Sullivan told DefenseScoop. 

Also among what he considers to be the Biden administration’s DIB-enabling accomplishments is the long list of moves to support Ukraine’s military in response to Russia’s large-scale invasion.

“I think the single biggest thing about this war that we have not seen as acutely in previous conflicts is the need to constantly adapt and iterate — that it is a learning function on both sides. There’s an innovation in a capability, it produces great lethality. The other side adjusts, comes up with an electronic warfare solution to degrade that lethality, the other side then has to adjust. And so it’s war through some combination of technological adjustment and software update, and that is an unusual thing for people used to fighting a more static type of conflict,” Sullivan said.

The U.S., under Biden, committed to injecting more than $1.5 billion in multiple types of investments to help Ukraine get to a point where it can manufacture and produce drones at scale — steadily, during a still-unfolding war, he said.

“And the point that I’m trying to register for the incoming team is [that] whatever happens in Ukraine, the need for this sustained scale-up is there for U.S. deterrence and U.S. defense needs for this foreseeable future — and we just have to be able to somehow convert that reality into an actionable demand signal that industry can respond on,” Sullivan told reporters. 

Applying lessons learned from Ukraine domestically, the administration held what Sullivan called a “first-of-its-kind conference” with officials from across the U.S. combatant commands and Pentagon acquisition components “to take stock of, essentially, where does this UAV component fit into the future of warfare.”

Biden appointees leading the Pentagon launched the high-profile Replicator initiative to accelerate the delivery of next-generation warfighting technologies in repeatable processes — beginning with thousands of drones to be fielded by August 2025 to counter China’s growing military build-up. 

“The idea is basically to learn a lot of the lessons that we’ve seen over the course of the past couple of years from Ukraine,” Sullivan noted.

He declined to give reporters a precise timeline for Replicator system deployment plans but expressed confidence that it would carry on as a priority initiative in the Trump administration.

“I have no reason to believe the new team is going to say, ‘Nope, we’re going to take that away.’ You’d have to ask them, but I think that that has a momentum of its own that can and should continue,” Sullivan said.

To date, Trump’s team has not disclosed whether they aim to cut, keep or modify Replicator. Spokespersons from his transition team did not respond to DefenseScoop’s request for comment before publication.

“What’s interesting to me is that if the U.S. actually went to war tomorrow — itself — I think that the pace of change would iterate much more rapidly. So, the possibility that this timeline can be accelerated just through agency is there. Now, agency typically is driven more by external imperatives. Necessity being the mother of invention, rather than just by us coming together to say we’re going to do it,” Sullivan told reporters.

“But my pitch to the incoming team is, with all the lessons we’ve now learned and the picture we now see so clearly, let’s take some steps, and let’s do it on a bipartisan basis,” he said.

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